Bid Decision Framework
Make data-driven bid/no-bid decisions with weighted scoring, win probability, strategic fit, and competitive intelligence
Bid Decision Framework
Every pursuit costs time and money before you ever submit. The Bid Decision framework helps you answer the fundamental question — should we bid? — with evidence instead of gut feel.
Cothon scores each opportunity against your company profile, your configured priorities, and historical market data, then gives you a clear recommendation you can accept or override.
What the framework includes
- Decision Scoring — a weighted composite score built from four components (capability match, competitive position, effort vs. opportunity, risk), adjusted by a strategic fit multiplier, producing one of four recommendations: Strong Bid, Consider Bid, Conditional Bid, or No Bid.
- Win Probability — a separate estimate of your likelihood of winning, calculated from your recorded bid history and the opportunity's characteristics, with a confidence level.
- Strategic Fit — how well the opportunity aligns with the industries, agencies, regions, and contract sizes you have declared as priorities.
- Competitive Intelligence — who wins similar contracts, how active the market is, and which companies are named in the tender documents.
- Recording Outcomes — capture what actually happened (awarded, lost, declined, withdrawn, no response) so future predictions improve.
- Performance Dashboard — your win rate, value won, effort invested, and decision accuracy over time.
- Scoring Settings — the Bid Config page where you tune weights, thresholds, effort assumptions, hard gates, and flagged terms.
Where you'll see it
Bid decision tools live on the opportunity workspace. Open an opportunity to calculate its bid decision, win probability, and strategic fit, and to view its competitive intelligence panel. Win probability also appears in the Active Bids war-room for pursuits you have committed to, where it can be calculated on demand.
Note
Decision quality depends on your inputs. A complete company profile, a linked bid analysis of the RFP, and configured strategic priorities all sharpen the recommendation.
A typical workflow
- Analyze the RFP with Bid Analysis so requirements and capability gaps are known.
- Calculate the bid decision on the opportunity page. Review the composite score, the four component scores, and the listed strengths, risk factors, and conditions.
- Check win probability and strategic fit for a second and third perspective: can we win it, and do we even want it?
- Review competitive intelligence to understand incumbents and likely bidders.
- Decide — follow the recommendation or record a manual override with your reasoning.
- After the outcome is known, record it. Recorded outcomes feed win probability and the performance dashboard.
Decision categories
| Recommendation | Default score | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| Strong Bid | ≥ 75 | Excellent alignment — proceed with confidence |
| Consider Bid | ≥ 60 | Good potential — address gaps before committing |
| Conditional Bid | ≥ 45 | Proceed only if specific conditions are met |
| No Bid | < 45 | Poor alignment — allocate resources elsewhere |
Thresholds are defaults; tune them in Scoring Settings.
Warning
Hard gates can override the score entirely. If mandatory requirements cannot be met and the "require all critical requirements met" gate is enabled, the recommendation is forced to No Bid regardless of the composite score.
The feedback loop
The framework is designed to learn from you:
- Before bidding, it predicts (decision score, win probability).
- After bidding, you record the actual outcome and what drove it.
- Over time, the Performance Dashboard shows how accurate the recommendations were, and win probability becomes calibrated to your real win rates.
The more outcomes you record, the more your own history — overall, by contract size, and by department — replaces generic market baselines in the calculations.
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